Grosvenor
7th Apr 2014, 11:42
Sixty years ago a twenty-minute flip across the channel was all it took to be in a different world, before Brussels bureaucrats took is in (in all senses of the word) and before Nigel (who may get us out) was even a glint in his father’s eye. (Politics over – now for the reminiscing.) I was taking a friend, a teenager like myself, to Le Touquet. We had returned from Libya where we had met on a film-location. While there the BOAC Argonaut air crash at Tripoli’s primitive international airport, Idris occurred. Fifteen had been killed in the disaster.
It’s hard to believe that England once had an airport busier than its competitor London’s Heathrow yet in the mid 1950s that was exactly the case. The airport was in a bog 73 miles from London, its single runway on a piece of shingle next to a nuclear power station. This was Dickens’ country. A moonscape of abandoned shingle beach and tufted greenery. The novelist had described it in Great Expectations as ‘a bleak place, a dark flat wilderness intersected with dykes and mounds.’ It was there that the boy Pip was confronted by convict Magwitch. A century and a half later not much had changed as I nursed the scooter, Rosemarie sitting behind, along the narrow winding tar strip that was the road from Ashford.
The airport, despite its busy traffic movements, comprised just two squat single-storey whitewashed buildings, the first was the Reception which doubled as a cafeteria and a pre-fab that was the customs-post. We were nodded through to the Bristol Superfreighter that was to start our weekend in France. The aeroplane had increased the company’s carrying capacity from two cars per plane to three and their passengers. Scooters were squeezed in wherever there was a bit of space, no booking and just £1 single. (Alright that’s about £22 in current money, but it still competed well with the sea-ferries). For Rosemarie, who -after Tripoli - still flinched at any sudden aircraft noise, it was a mercy that any sense of take-off or landing was minimised by the fixed undercarriage and the flying altitude of a thousand feet, virtually hugging the waves all the way.
Just twenty-five minutes after checking in at Lydd we were driving out of Le Touquet’s even more primitive terminal. In the 1950s it was not surprising that scooters were popular all over Europe with fashion-conscious teenagers many of whom were women. Unlike motor-cycles, scooter-riders, both driver and passenger, had no need of special clothing and were isolated from the repellent noise and engine-smell that were the very same attributes admired by decades of motor cyclists. In London Rosemarie had been enthralled by an Audrey Hepburn movie in which the star rode scooter side-saddle through the streets of Rome. Whilst England was still seventeen years away from compulsory crash-helmets, side-saddle riding had never been permitted. I wasn’t sure that the French didn’t share this sensible safety rule but Rosemarie was confident and refused to straddle the machine. “It’s the Continent, they’re more likely to think like the Italians than us.” Certainly as we passed the airport gendarme he simply gave a wave, a typically French long look at Rosemarie and shouted “Tenez la Droite Monsieur!” as I drove on the wrong side of a bollard.
By the beginning of the Sixties, unable to see off the competition from the new breed of roll on-roll off cross-channel ferries Silver City’s glorious thirteen years as a pioneer were numbered. Though just an infrequent passenger I have fond memories of Air CdreTaffy Powell’s brainchild.
More of the trip, the desert film-location,that Argonaut tragedy and what the RAF had done to Le Touquet at http://lovelifeandmovingpictures.com (http://lovelifeandmovingpictures.com/) .If my memory has been faulty (It’s a lifetime ago FGS!) I shall welcome correction. Terence Sharkey.
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fglostransporthistory.visit-gloucestershire.co.uk%2Fimages%2FAir_Bristol%252520170%25252 0Mk%25252032%252520Silver%252520City%252520G-ANWN.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fglostransporthistory.visit-gloucestershire.co.uk%2FJetAgeRMC_Bristol170.htm&h=412&w=640&tbnid=mE8q3Byt7XNCTM%3A&zoom=1&docid=0PJAVhc9eh78hM&ei=ZY5CU43wK4SThgeNs4DoBQ&tbm=isch&ved=0CFwQhBwwAQ&iact=rc&dur=1187&page=1&start=0&ndsp=16
It’s hard to believe that England once had an airport busier than its competitor London’s Heathrow yet in the mid 1950s that was exactly the case. The airport was in a bog 73 miles from London, its single runway on a piece of shingle next to a nuclear power station. This was Dickens’ country. A moonscape of abandoned shingle beach and tufted greenery. The novelist had described it in Great Expectations as ‘a bleak place, a dark flat wilderness intersected with dykes and mounds.’ It was there that the boy Pip was confronted by convict Magwitch. A century and a half later not much had changed as I nursed the scooter, Rosemarie sitting behind, along the narrow winding tar strip that was the road from Ashford.
The airport, despite its busy traffic movements, comprised just two squat single-storey whitewashed buildings, the first was the Reception which doubled as a cafeteria and a pre-fab that was the customs-post. We were nodded through to the Bristol Superfreighter that was to start our weekend in France. The aeroplane had increased the company’s carrying capacity from two cars per plane to three and their passengers. Scooters were squeezed in wherever there was a bit of space, no booking and just £1 single. (Alright that’s about £22 in current money, but it still competed well with the sea-ferries). For Rosemarie, who -after Tripoli - still flinched at any sudden aircraft noise, it was a mercy that any sense of take-off or landing was minimised by the fixed undercarriage and the flying altitude of a thousand feet, virtually hugging the waves all the way.
Just twenty-five minutes after checking in at Lydd we were driving out of Le Touquet’s even more primitive terminal. In the 1950s it was not surprising that scooters were popular all over Europe with fashion-conscious teenagers many of whom were women. Unlike motor-cycles, scooter-riders, both driver and passenger, had no need of special clothing and were isolated from the repellent noise and engine-smell that were the very same attributes admired by decades of motor cyclists. In London Rosemarie had been enthralled by an Audrey Hepburn movie in which the star rode scooter side-saddle through the streets of Rome. Whilst England was still seventeen years away from compulsory crash-helmets, side-saddle riding had never been permitted. I wasn’t sure that the French didn’t share this sensible safety rule but Rosemarie was confident and refused to straddle the machine. “It’s the Continent, they’re more likely to think like the Italians than us.” Certainly as we passed the airport gendarme he simply gave a wave, a typically French long look at Rosemarie and shouted “Tenez la Droite Monsieur!” as I drove on the wrong side of a bollard.
By the beginning of the Sixties, unable to see off the competition from the new breed of roll on-roll off cross-channel ferries Silver City’s glorious thirteen years as a pioneer were numbered. Though just an infrequent passenger I have fond memories of Air CdreTaffy Powell’s brainchild.
More of the trip, the desert film-location,that Argonaut tragedy and what the RAF had done to Le Touquet at http://lovelifeandmovingpictures.com (http://lovelifeandmovingpictures.com/) .If my memory has been faulty (It’s a lifetime ago FGS!) I shall welcome correction. Terence Sharkey.
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fglostransporthistory.visit-gloucestershire.co.uk%2Fimages%2FAir_Bristol%252520170%25252 0Mk%25252032%252520Silver%252520City%252520G-ANWN.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fglostransporthistory.visit-gloucestershire.co.uk%2FJetAgeRMC_Bristol170.htm&h=412&w=640&tbnid=mE8q3Byt7XNCTM%3A&zoom=1&docid=0PJAVhc9eh78hM&ei=ZY5CU43wK4SThgeNs4DoBQ&tbm=isch&ved=0CFwQhBwwAQ&iact=rc&dur=1187&page=1&start=0&ndsp=16